1 Just home from West Virginia, where my wife's family gather at her
2 grandmother's house to celebrate Thanksgiving. The traditional turkey feast
3 was pleasant as always, but the real culinary high point of this trip was on
6 The closest major airport is Pittsburgh, we had a couple of extra hours on
7 Saturday before our flight, and Karen and I are both graduates of
8 <a href="http://www.cmu.edu/">CMU</a>. So
9 we decided to detour into Pittsburgh and and drive around a bit to see how
10 things had changed over the years and what was still familiar.
12 The biggest visible differences to us were on the river fronts, from
13 the new stadium that replaced Three Rivers to what looks like a technology
14 park built along the Monongahela under the parkway, where steel mills
15 once stood. We didn't take time to do more than drive around the CMU
16 perimeter, but even that let us see that the campus landscape has changed
17 dramatically since we were students. Otherwise, most of the major landmarks
18 that matter to us remain unchanged, including the apartment on South Millvale
19 I lived in for all but my freshman years at CMU.
22 '<a href="http://www.hollyeats.com/OriginalHotDog.htm">the O</a>'
23 was still alive and well on Forbes avenue! I'm sure I ate there an average
24 of at least once a week from the time Steve Fisher introduced me to the place
25 until I moved to Colorado. I often tell people that the best part of having
26 to travel a lot for work is that I get to sample interesting foods from around
27 the world... and many of my strongest travel memories are of meals enjoyed
28 with interesting people and wonderful food. However, despite all those
29 experiences, 'O' fries continue to rank near the very top of my list of foods
30 I'm willing to go out of my way for. Even my 5-year-old son, who can be a lot
31 pickier about what he'll eat than I like to admit, thanked me repeatedly
32 on the flights home the rest of the afternoon for "making me try those french
35 Sometime, I'd love to spend enough time in Pittsburgh to see how many of the
36 other places I used to love to eat are still around... In the meantime, a
37 regular fix of chili dogs and fries at the 'O' are one of the few things I
38 really miss about the years I spent in Pittsburgh.